Sound laws · Law 29 · Consonants

Single L between vowels: lost in Portuguese, r in Romanian

-L- (single, between vowels)

Spanish

l kept

French

l kept

Italian

l kept

Portuguese

lost (céu, fio, cor)

Romanian

r (cer, fir, sare)

Catalan

l kept

What happened

A single l between vowels is stable in Spanish, French, Italian and Catalan, but the two sisters at the edges of the Romance world both reworked it. Portuguese (with Galician) lost it in the early Middle Ages, often leaving two vowels side by side that later merged (DOLŌREM → door → dor, MOLAM → mó). Romanian turned it into r (rhotacism): CAELUM → cer, FĪLUM → fir; Slavic words borrowed later keep their l (milă), so the change is older than Slavic contact. Double LL was spared in both and simplified into a new single l (CABALLUM → cavalo, cal).

Examples

Latin	Italian	Spanish	French	Portuguese	Romanian	Catalan	English relative
FĪLUM‘thread’	filo	hilo	fil	fio	fir	fil	filament
CAELUM‘sky’	cielo	cielo	ciel	céu	cer	cel	celestial
MOLAM‘millstone (ro moară 'mill')’	mola	muela	meule	mó	moară	mola
SALĪRE‘to jump (es 'go out', it 'climb', pt 'go out')’	salire	salir	saillir	sair	sări	—
COLŌREM‘colour’	colore	color	couleur	cor	—	color	colour
VOLĀRE‘to fly’	volare	volar	voler	voar	—	volar
SALEM‘salt (l final in pt, kept)’	sale	sal	sel	sal	sare	sal	saline

Decoder

A short Portuguese word with a vowel clash where the sisters have -l-? Put the l back: céu → cielo, cel; cor → color; voar → volar. A Romanian r between vowels may be an l elsewhere: cer, fir, sare → cielo, filo, sal.

Exceptions

Portuguese kept an l that ended up word-final (sal, mel), but loses it again in the plural, where a vowel follows: sais, méis. Learned and later words keep l in both languages (Portuguese calor, celeste; Romanian milă, a Slavic loan). Old Romanian texts and some northern dialects also turned single n into r, but the standard kept n.